#Endless Garden

[midoristeashop]

“—Because for so long he’d been looking, and yet here it was. Right in front of him. It felt like finding a home he didn’t even know he had.”

this may or may not be a subtle nod for secret and kae to finish endless garden PUH LEASE

that one scene where hic and jack and talking on the ledge is something I’ve wanted to draw for a while, and I happened to had the motivation to draw an illustration + comic thingy so here she is (will I make a comic of the full scene? Perhaps perhaps)

Anyway @hijacksecrets and @vindikaetion absolutely no rush I just wanted to appreciate your stupid amazing writing ily

[hijacksecrets]

Chapters: 1/? Fandom: How to Train Your Dragon (Movies), Rise of the Guardians (2012) Rating: General Audiences Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply Relationships: Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III/Jack Frost (Guardians of Childhood) Characters: Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III, Jack Frost (Guardians of Childhood), Nicholas St. North, Toothless (How to Train Your Dragon) Additional Tags: Hanahaki Disease, Hanahaki AU, Post-Canon, Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Blood, Minor Swearing, Other Additional Tags to Be Added Summary:

“Who the hell are you?” Jack looked him up and down, utterly bewildered.

The stranger startled, finally righting himself so he could turn to Jack. “Jack—” he coughed, before continuing, “Jack Frost?”

Jack’s eyebrows raised.

“...Do I know you?” he asked slowly, trying to find something familiar about his figure, his mask, or even his weird nasally voice, but nothing rang any bells. “I don’t think we’ve met.”

“Oh, no no, I uh…” Facing away from Jack, the spirit then turned towards the horizon and started to drift away. “I keep to myself.”

“So you know who I am but I still don’t know who you are.” He squinted even more curiously at the stranger, a grin growing at this new mystery. It wasn’t often that he met a brand new spirit, after all.

~*~*~*~*

HEY GUYS for Hijack Week Day 4: Hanahaki, @kaeviche and I collaborated on a oneshot together (kinda, we didn't succeed on making it a one shot since its gonna have at least 3 chapters LOL)

We only have one chapter up so far, and we're currently working on chapter 2! :D this has been SUPER fun to work on with Kae AAAAH i can't wait to finish it!!

[vindikaetion]

Hi, could i ask if there’s still going to be a last chapter of endless garden? 🥹 i really love it and i dont know if this has been asked before or if im missing something but if yes, do u have any idea when it’ll be up?

Omg hi! I'm gonna be so honest, we literally have the entire chapter planned out, we were just struggling to write it because there's a scene with like ten people, and writing it was a nightmare. We didn't like what we came up with so we wanted to rewrite it, but actually getting around to it has been difficult 😭

Secret and I are both pretty busy so we haven't really had time to sit down and actually write it, but rest assured it'll happen!! ... Eventually JDBDBSBSBSBSBSBSB

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Red Lobster was killed by private equity, not Endless Shrimp

For the rest of May, my bestselling solarpunk utopian novel THE LOST CAUSE (2023) is available as a $2.99, DRM-free ebook!

A decade ago, a hedge fund had an improbable viral comedy hit: a 294-page slide deck explaining why Olive Garden was going out of business, blaming the failure on too many breadsticks and insufficiently salted pasta-water:

https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/940944/000092189514002031/ex991dfan14a06297125_091114.pdf

Everyone loved this story. As David Dayen wrote for Salon, it let readers "mock that silly chain restaurant they remember from their childhoods in the suburbs" and laugh at "the silly hedge fund that took the time to write the world’s worst review":

https://www.salon.com/2014/09/17/the_real_olive_garden_scandal_why_greedy_hedge_funders_suddenly_care_so_much_about_breadsticks/

But – as Dayen wrote at the time, the hedge fund that produced that slide deck, Starboard Value, was not motivated by dissatisfaction with bread-sticks. They were "activist investors" (finspeak for "rapacious assholes") with a giant stake in Darden Restaurants, Olive Garden's parent company. They wanted Darden to liquidate all of Olive Garden's real-estate holdings and declare a one-off dividend that would net investors a billion dollars, while literally yanking the floor out from beneath Olive Garden, converting it from owner to tenant, subject to rent-shocks and other nasty surprises.

They wanted to asset-strip the company, in other words ("asset strip" is what they call it in hedge-fund land; the mafia calls it a "bust-out," famous to anyone who watched the twenty-third episode of The Sopranos):

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bust_Out

Starboard didn't have enough money to force the sale, but they had recently engineered the CEO's ouster. The giant slide-deck making fun of Olive Garden's food was just a PR campaign to help it sell the bust-out by creating a narrative that they were being activists* to save this badly managed disaster of a restaurant chain.

*assholes

Starboard was bent on eviscerating Darden like a couple of entrail-maddened dogs in an elk carcass:

https://web.archive.org/web/20051220005944/http://alumni.media.mit.edu/~solan/dogsinelk/

They had forced Darden to sell off another of its holdings, Red Lobster, to a hedge-fund called Golden Gate Capital. Golden Gate flogged all of Red Lobster's real estate holdings for $2.1 billion the same day, then pissed it all away on dividends to its shareholders, including Starboard. The new landlords, a Real Estate Investment Trust, proceeded to charge so much for rent on those buildings Red Lobster just flogged that the company's net earnings immediately dropped by half.

Dayen ends his piece with these prophetic words:

Olive Garden and Red Lobster may not be destinations for hipster Internet journalists, and they have seen revenue declines amid stagnant middle-class wages and increased competition. But they are still profitable businesses. Thousands of Americans work there. Why should they be bled dry by predatory investors in the name of “shareholder value”? What of the value of worker productivity instead of the financial engineers?

Flash forward a decade. Today, Dayen is editor-in-chief of The American Prospect, one of the best sources of news about private equity looting in the world. Writing for the Prospect, Luke Goldstein picks up Dayen's story, ten years on:

https://prospect.org/economy/2024-05-22-raiding-red-lobster/

It's not pretty. Ten years of being bled out on rents and flipped from one hedge fund to another has killed Red Lobster. It just shuttered 50 restaurants and declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Ten years hasn't changed much; the same kind of snark that was deployed at the news of Olive Garden's imminent demise is now being hurled at Red Lobster.

Instead of dunking on free bread-sticks, Red Lobster's grave-dancers are jeering at "Endless Shrimp," a promotional deal that works exactly how it sounds like it would work. Endless Shrimp cost the chain $11m.

Which raises a question: why did Red Lobster make this money-losing offer? Are they just good-hearted slobs? Can't they do math?

Or, you know, was it another hedge-fund, bust-out scam?

Here's a hint. The supplier who provided Red Lobster with all that shrimp is Thai Union. Thai Union also owns Red Lobster. They bought the chain from Golden Gate Capital, last seen in 2014, holding a flash-sale on all of Red Lobster's buildings, pocketing billions, and cutting Red Lobster's earnings in half.

Red Lobster rose to success – 700 restaurants nationwide at its peak – by combining no-frills dining with powerful buying power, which it used to force discounts from seafood suppliers. In response, the seafood industry consolidated through a wave of mergers, turning into a cozy cartel that could resist the buyer power of Red Lobster and other major customers.

This was facilitated by conservation efforts that limited the total volume of biomass that fishers were allowed to extract, and allocated quotas to existing companies and individual fishermen. The costs of complying with this "catch management" system were high, punishingly so for small independents, bearably so for large conglomerates.

Competition from overseas fisheries drove consolidation further, as countries in the global south were blocked from implementing their own conservation efforts. US fisheries merged further, seeking economies of scale that would let them compete, largely by shafting fishermen and other suppliers. Today's Alaskan crab fishery is dominated by a four-company cartel; in the Pacific Northwest, most fish goes through a single intermediary, Pacific Seafood.

These dominant actors entered into illegal collusive arrangements with one another to rig their markets and further immiserate their suppliers, who filed antitrust suits accusing the companies of operating a monopsony (a market with a powerful buyer, akin to a monopoly, which is a market with a powerful seller):

https://www.classaction.org/news/pacific-seafood-under-fire-for-allegedly-fixing-prices-paid-to-dungeness-crabbers-in-pacific-northwest

Golden Gate bought Red Lobster in the midst of these fish wars, promising to right its ship. As Goldstein points out, that's the same promise they made when they bought Payless shoes, just before they destroyed the company and flogged it off to Alden Capital, the hedge fund that bought and destroyed dozens of America's most beloved newspapers:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/10/16/sociopathic-monsters/#all-the-news-thats-fit-to-print

Under Golden Gate's management, Red Lobster saw its staffing levels slashed, so diners endured longer wait times to be seated and served. Then, in 2020, they sold the company to Thai Union, the company's largest supplier (a transaction Goldstein likens to a Walmart buyout of Procter and Gamble).

Thai Union continued to bleed Red Lobster, imposing more cuts and loading it up with more debts financed by yet another private equity giant, Fortress Investment Group. That brings us to today, with Thai Union having moved a gigantic amount of its own product through a failing, debt-loaded subsidiary, even as it lobbies for deregulation of American fisheries, which would let it and its lobbying partners drain American waters of the last of its depleted fish stocks.

Dayen's 2020 must-read book Monopolized describes the way that monopolies proliferate, using the US health care industry as a case-study:

https://pluralistic.net/2021/01/29/fractal-bullshit/#dayenu

After deregulation allowed the pharma sector to consolidate, it acquired pricing power of hospitals, who found themselves gouged to the edge of bankruptcy on drug prices. Hospitals then merged into regional monopolies, which allowed them to resist pharma pricing power – and gouge health insurance companies, who saw the price of routine care explode. So the insurance companies gobbled each other up, too, leaving most of us with two or fewer choices for health insurance – even as insurance prices skyrocketed, and our benefits shrank.

Today, Americans pay more for worse healthcare, which is delivered by health workers who get paid less and work under worse conditions. That's because, lacking a regulator to consolidate patients' interests, and strong unions to consolidate workers' interests, patients and workers are easy pickings for those consolidated links in the health supply-chain.

That's a pretty good model for understanding what's happened to Red Lobster: monopoly power and monopsony power begat more monopolies and monoposonies in the supply chain. Everything that hasn't consolidated is defenseless: diners, restaurant workers, fishermen, and the environment. We're all fucked.

Decent, no-frills family restaurant are good. Great, even. I'm not the world's greatest fan of chain restaurants, but I'm also comfortably middle-class and not struggling to afford to give my family a nice night out at a place with good food, friendly staff and reasonable prices. These places are easy pickings for looters because the people who patronize them have little power in our society – and because those of us with more power are easily tricked into sneering at these places' failures as a kind of comeuppance that's all that's due to tacky joints that serve the working class.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/05/23/spineless/#invertebrates

[rona-eser]

"Father, why eternal torment? Is it not cruel?

Is torture unending truly a fate fit for a fool?"

[teejaystumbles]

You got a look in your eyes (Your eyes) I knew you in a past life

for @dancinbutterfly's fuckboi

[fishfingersandscarves]

dream and his parasocial post-apocalyptic radio boyfriend from @moorishflower 's wonderful fic, Radio Silence

[20001541]

random headcanon I have about afo and yoichi:

He's a voracious eater. He's the tallest non heteromorph character in the entire series. Being extremely tall would make you burn through a lot of calories faster so he has to eat a lot in order to compensate for that. He could eat 7 plates of food for dinner in one sitting. He's just a big boy who can eat a lot. He likes to snack throughout the day.

Yoichi is the opposite he gets nauseous easily while eating so he eats slow and little at a time. He doesn't eat things that have strong flavors otherwise he starts gagging. He rarely if ever finishes his plate. AFO always volunteers to finish off what Yoichi doesn't eat. He enjoys plain food that's easy to chew and digest. He also deals with bad stomach cramps after every meal.

[baltharino]

Yoshino Nanjō & Aina Kusuda performing Garden of Glass μ's 4th Love Live! ~ ENDLESS PARADE ~ (2014)

[ibrithir-was-here]

Been watching OTGW and this silly little idea popped into my head and I had to doodle it quick xD

[solsarts]

On the mountain tall,

Whisper to me words in a voice so small

[designtheendless]

If dreams can’t come true, then why not pretend? 🍂

[hijacksecrets]

CHAPTER 3 IS UP!! Also we know chapter 3 was supposed to be the last chapter, but @alterkaetion and I overdid it and ended up having to split the chapter in half LOL, BUT the next chapter is almost finished so hopefully it won’t take us as long to post! 

Hope y’all enjoy!!! :D

[doctorslippery]

The gluten got in the way of the fluten.

[samirafee]

#HYDRANGEA MACROPHYLLA *The Bride* - WHITE ENDLESS SUMMER HYDRANGEA🤍

@samirafee

[westerberg]

The fact that the phrase is “the land of milk and honey” and not “the land of beer and cheese” is proof of how prejudiced the world is against the American Upper Midwest